Free Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? by Melissa Senate

mind.”
    “If you need me, Eloise,” he said, “you just call me.” He took my hands and looked into my eyes. “You come first. You need me and I’m in the middle of interviewing Oprah’s friend’s friend’s cousin’s next-door neighbor’s sister, I’ll take your call. You can count on that.”
    I hit him with a pillow.
    But I did feel better.
    “So are you going to call Emmett?”
    I didn’t feel better.
    “Give it some thought,” he said.
    I nodded and watched him choose between his red Snoopy tie and his blue Addams Family with tiny Morticias. He added Morticia to his at-the-ready duffel bag, the one that was always packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice, then kissed me long and hard and passionately, and was gone.
     
    Call Emmett. Don’t call. Call Emmett. Don’t call.
    I spent my Sunday going back and forth, back and forth.
    When the sun went down, I moved from the couch to my bed and grabbed my packet from Perfect People. I pulled out the photo of my fake brother, Ewan McGregorly. He had long teeth. Model’s teeth.
    I smiled wide at myself in the mirror over the dresser. I didn’t have big teeth. I had my mother’s teeth, my mother’s smile.
    I had my father’s eyes. So did Emmett.
    Ewan did too, apparently. Well, close enough. Almond-shaped, but slightly turned down at the corners.
    Under my bed was a box containing the one photo album that had pictures of my father. I pulled the album onto my bed and flipped through it.
    On the second page, Emmett, in his Scooby Doo pajamas, was sitting on Theo Manfred’s shoulders, covering his eyes and laughing. Theo was laughing too.
    How did you go from being the man in this picture to never seeing that little boy again? Never feeling the weight of that little body in your arms? Never seeing that face, so much like your own?
    How?
    There was also one of me on his shoulders. Eloise, age five, and Daddy, said the caption label that my mother wrote. Theo Manfred’s hands were around my ankles, and he was looking up at me. My hands were high in the air, and my smile was so big it must have hurt.
    Every time I looked at that picture, I thought that I must have felt safe up there.
    Look, Ma, no hands.
    Again, how? How could you go from this picture to never seeing that little girl again?
    The one photograph that always made me feel slightly sick was the one of me, just me, holding a small white paper bag in one hand and a fistful of jelly beans in the other. I was five.
    My father had bought me that bag of jelly beans. He used to take me to one of those tiny candy shops lined with plastic cubbies filled with brightly colored candies and silver scoops. He’d hand me a white paper bag and check his watch.
    “You have exactly one minute and fifteen seconds to fill up this white paper bag with all the candy you want,” he’d say. “Ready, set…go!”
    And tongue out in fierce concentration, I’d go running. For the Tootsie Rolls. For the chocolate turtles. For the jelly beans. I’d end up with a pound of candy to eat for the week.
    A couple of days after he left for good, I found three jelly beans at the bottom of the bag, green ones that I didn’t like and couldn’t get Emmett to eat, either. I scrunched up the bag and put it under my mattress. When I was thirteen and alternating between apathy and fury that later would become my trademark ambivalence about everything, I threw it away. Emmett, ten at the time, had thrown a fit. You should have given the bag to me…I don’t have a last thing from our father…who do you think you are, Eloise! I hate you! I hate everybody!
    I’d changed in that instant. I’d gone from being your basic self-absorbed new teenager, wondering why I didn’t have my period, to being aware of people’s feelings. Suddenly, Emmett wasn’t my younger brother, in turn annoying and funny; he was a deeply sad boy whose father had left before he even had a chance to know him. I became ferociously protective of Emmett. If a